Devastating.
Let's see what he can do with this.
Bloomberg's opponents are circulating this piece of video, or excerpts from it. It shows Bloomberg being dismissive of farmers and factory workers.
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| CLICK HERE 60 Seconds |
He said their work could be done by simpletons, but technology takes brains.
"I can teach anybody, even people in this room, so no offense intended, to be a farmer. It's a process, see, you dig a hole, you put seed in, you add water, up comes the corn.
Then . . . we had three hundred years of the industrial society, you put the piece of metal in the crank, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job. . . .
Now comes the information economy. The information economy is fundamentally different. . . The skillsets you have to learn are how to think and analyze. That is a whole degree level different. . . . You have to have a lot more gray matter."
Yikes! Click and watch.
Yesterday this blog noted that we were in the period when opposition researchers and reporters do their work. Bits of video like this are brought to light. There had been a thrill in the air in some quarters, thinking we had The One, a guy we only knew enough about to think he was a winner, a guy who can stand up to Trump. Now comes the dirt, the problems, the warts and embarrassments. The honeymoon fades in the bright light of messy reality.
Anyone with a long record has laid out land mines for himself. I consider this a big one. It hits the sour notes squarely, a combination of Hillary's "deplorable" and Obama's "cling to guns and Bibles." It voices the disdain attributed to cultural and financial elites, those urban, sophisticated, snooty, condescending Democrats. People hear this and realize he doesn't just hate guns; he disrespects you.
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| CLICK: Takedown effort at work |
Bloomberg voices the "meritocracy" direction of the Democratic Party. Meritocracy Democrats give up on trying to make the semi-skilled jobs that most Americans actually have pay enough to have a house, family, health care, and a secure retirement. Meritocracy Democrats say one needs to leave that doomed class and join the professional class. Otherwise one is competing with low wage foreigners.
Hearing him, how could working people believe Bloomberg respects farmers and other working people?
It isn't over yet. Now the real campaign begins.
We get to see if Bloomberg has what it takes to be president.
One cannot be in public life without having said things that look bad, and made decisions that didn't work out, and carried out policies that might have been popular in one decade and anathema in the next. Bloomberg is a victim of all three.
This happened to Trump, and he thrived. Trump's success in managing exploding land mines is to plow past them. Stand tall. Put a new story on top of the old story.
With chin up, Bloomberg can say something like:
"I have total respect for farmers and always have and this video proves it. Farmers today are soil scientists, chemists, biologists, mechanical engineers all wrapped into one. I was referring to medieval farmers, not the highly productive scientific farmers of today. That was my point, that farming and factory work now is different and it takes enormous brain power, and my opponents know that's what I said. They chopped up that video. American farmers and factory people are the best in the world. Shame on my opponents for distorting me."
Is that exactly true? I think not. I think he was, in fact, dismissive and disrespectful and speaking from the arrogant point of view of an educated New Yorker with little appreciation of rural America or farming or factory work. The question is can he sell something like the alternate version above. If he can, he can be president.
Democrats are looking for a warrior. A successful warrior doesn't flinch.
5 comments:
Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams defended billionaire Michael Bloomberg on Monday for using his riches to compete in the Democrat presidential primary and buy elections.
“Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances to buy elections,” Abrams said in an interview on ABC’s The View on Monday about Bloomberg.
Abrams compared Bloomberg using his billions to boost his campaign to other candidates using their natural talent or pets to run for office.
“Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever,” she said. “I think it’s an appropriate question to raise. But I don’t think it’s disqualifying for anyone to invest in fixing America.”
According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, Abrams received a $5 million donation from Bloomberg in December 2019, to Fair Fight, her political action committee to fight voter suppression.
Abrams indicated it was comforting to know the source of Michael Bloomberg’s money, despite many Democrats complaining that the former New York City mayor was trying to buy the election.
“I think that for once we actually know where the money is coming from,” she said.
Abrams also walked back her March 2019 assertion that she was no longer interested in serving as a vice presidential candidate.
“It would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space for me to say no or to pretend, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want it,’” she said in the interview. “Of course I want it. Of course, I want to serve America. Of course I want to be a patriot and do this work.”
I watched the clip. Seems more pedantic than entitled to me. Unless you are predisposed to dislike the man or have assumptions about his attitudes I don't think it's fair to say he was being arrogant, though you are right Regressives will squawk "disrespecting our beloved farmers"!
His point is true, that's all that needs to be said, and I hope his Democratic opponents don't take the bait.
Interestingly, one of the primary characteristics of the Regressive mindset is its mythologizing of the agrarian past.
While the media is obsessed with the cage match, the election is simply a matter of whether or not voters:
A. Vote
B. Actually, there is no B
"The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution." --Justice John Paul Stevens dissenting opinion on the Citizens United decision allowing unlimited financing of elections.
The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. We will either have government of, by and for the people or we will have the best (or worst) government money can buy.
Andy Seles
Bernie, Biden, Warren, Klobuchar, and Mayor Pete are all going to be going after Bloomberg in the Nevada debate. Bloomberg has spent a lot of money on advertising to get his name out there, but he's a weak debater, and expect the other democrats to destroy Bloomie.
I've seen this kind of attitude from people who have never been in a factory before (we can call them the elites). They have seen too many movies of workers doing mass production. I've worked around highly skilled technicians and assemblers in high-tech manufacturing for years and many of those jobs require a high degree of skill, constant learning, and problem solving ability. People who haven't done this work or worked in the environment often dismiss it as work for drones.
For this and many other reasons I don't want to see Bloomberg as the nominee but I do want to see his money spent vilifying Trump every minute of the day up until the election. I believe his efforts in this are very effective. That is the way to beat Trump and it's better to have him do that while the candidate speaks to a more positive message.
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